144 years after the invention of electric telegraphy, the last telegram service in the world will shut down. This technology is still used in India, where about 5,000 telegrams are sent down the wires daily. But on July 14, it will...stop.

The BSNL board, after dilly-dallying for two years, decided to shut down the service as it was no longer commercially viable.

"We were incurring losses of over $23 million a year because SMS and smartphones have rendered this service redundant," Shamim Akhtar, general manager of BSNL's telegraph services, told the Monitor.

I was offered a job at IBM via telegram. The only one I have ever received. I would like the last telegram to be important rather than poignant. Perhaps announcing the end of some war or the discovery of some cure.